Rupi Kaur: ‘My book would never have been published without social media’.
Photograph: Laura Aziz

Ordinarily, the illustration adorning the cover of a new book is not a big story, but such is the hype around the young Canadian poet Rupi Kaur that her plan to release the picture to her 1.3 million Instagram followers on 1 June is generating great excitement.

Kaur, 24, came from nowhere to sell 1.4 million copies of her first book, Milk and Honey. That is almost unheard of for a first-time writer, let alone a first-time poet. First self-published in 2014 and then by a publishing house the following year, the poetry collection became a New York Times bestseller. Now Kaur is building up anticipation on social media for her new anthology, which is due out in September. And here, the Observer publishes an exclusive extract.

She took a stand against Instagram, pointing out the hypocrisy of a platform that hosted sexual images of women yet censored a typical female experience. Followers came in their droves – 1.3 million of them at the last count (though notably she follows no one). “My book would never have been published without social media,” she says. “I wasn’t trying to write a book, it wasn’t even in my vision. I was posting stuff online just because it made me feel relieved – as a way of getting things off my chest.”

Milk and Honey is a collection of poems that tackles tough themes – rape, violence, alcoholism, trauma – but it’s written in Kaur’s trademark short, simple verse – with her own illustrations acting as visual punctuations.

“People aren’t used to poetry that’s so easy and simple,” she says.

And that is key to why Kaur has connected so strongly with millions of young people worldwide. Her poetry does not need heavy analysis. Rather like a rapper, she tells it how it is. One of the poems in Milk and Honey goes like this:

The thing about having

an alcoholic parent

is an alcoholic parent

does not exist.

Simply

an alcoholic

who could not stay sober

long enough to raise their kids

She is in Sydney this weekend, as part of a tour that has seen her take in Britain, Spain, New Zealand and, next month, Canada. This month in Brighton, tickets to her performance sold out in less than 45 minutes, her London show in less than 10. The audience was predominantly female, twentysomethings, mostly students.

“She has changed the way that a lot of us think about poetry – she’s dusted off its cobwebs,” said Daniella Bassett, 20, queueing for the Brighton show. “She really gets to the raw emotion of life – but puts it in a human way. It’s gorgeous.”

Clutching a copy of Kaur’s book, photography student Rebeca Gutierrez, 23, agreed. “The images speak to me just as much as the words.” But the simplicity of her work has drawn criticism too. And Kaur says she is hurt by that. At the same time, she revels in being anti-establishment.

“I don’t fit into the age, race or class of a bestselling poet,” she says, a glint in her eye.

“I used to submit to anthologies and magazines when I was a student – but I knew I was never going to be picked up. All their writing was, you know, about the Canadian landscape or something. And my poem is about this woman with her legs spread open.”

Born in Punjab, India, Kaur moved with her Sikh family to Toronto when she was four. She loved reading at school, but with English her second language she found it difficult to understand most of the poetry. What she loved was cutting and pasting words and images, or filling up poems with drawings.

It is not a million miles from what she does now and that formula will not change for her second book.

“It’s a grown-up version of Milk and Honey. The style is the same but I go deeper. It’s more emotional,” she says.

There are poems about refugees, immigration, revolution – each motivated in part, she says, by her experience of living and writing in the US during the rise of Donald Trump.

But a big part of the new book, too, is about the grief of losing “what you think is the love of your life – and dealing with its raw aftermath,” she says. “How do you redefine love when your idea of love is something that’s so violent? When your idea of passion is anger. How do you fix that?” she says.

Kaur does not necessarily write from experience. Hers seems to have been a happy, albeit strict upbringing on the outskirts of Toronto. She talks little of her past but simply points to her experience of being a woman as the thing that has most informed her writing.

Whatever you might think of it, there is little doubt Kaur is at the forefront of a poetry renaissance in both Britain and US. People line the streets to see her perform and last week Milk and Honey was still in Amazon’s top 40 bestellers in the UK, more than 18 months after publication.

During her Brighton performance, she wooed the audience like a pop star rather than a poet. It was as if they were under her spell. She asked them to click their fingers when something she recited “moves you emotionally”. As a result, the performance is punctuated by mass finger clicking, providing a rhythmic, almost musical backdrop to her words.

Kaur says it got her thinking. “How do I get this poetry bumping in somebody’s car? So maybe after this second book, I’ll get some time to go into a studio and perfect it,” she says.

She is unashamedly ambitious –a workaholic. She’s already 10 chapters into her first novel – “I’m just free-writing it at the moment” – and, apart from the music, she’s keen to experiment with screenwriting, films and photography.

“I want to do all those things – I want to double up – why not?” she asks.